Welcome to Production Note #28 – THE ONE WHERE WE TELL YOU THAT THE MOVIE IS READY!

Last Tuesday, Wolfgang and Lisa worked on putting together the color graded images and the edited audio files, and it worked without any technical difficulties – so this meant that the movie was finally ready!

It was a strange feeling, after two years of hard work, to know that this is finally it – this is the movie that we’re sharing with the world, sharing with you all who’ve followed and supported this project for so long. A mixture of total happiness, a certain blankness and quite some panic – is it as good as possible? We really hope you’ll like it.

However, having the movie itself ready doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to do. Right after finishing the movie, Lisa started to export the movie in differents formats, and Wolfgang started working on the subtitles of the movie.

As mentioned here before, Leo is kind of hard to understand at times – so it’s essential to have his words subtitled, especially for non-native English speakers. But we decided to not only subtitle Leo’s words but the whole movie in English, German and probably also in Italian.

So this means we have to transcribe the whole movie, put each subtitle at exactly the right position in the movie’s timeline (that’s called “spotting”) and follow all those other rules for good subtitling – it’s quite the job. After that, Leo’s manager Vencie Varnado will watch the movie and tell us if we got every word right in the subtitles. We’ll probably have to do some corrections after that, and then we’ll translate the subtitles to German and probably to Italian.

When the subtitles are ready, we can take the movie in its highest quality, add the subtitle files and put everything together on a DCP – that’s basically a harddisk that you can plug into a cinema projector. Cinemas can then decide what version to show – a version where only Leo is subtitled in English, a version where every word is subtitled in English, a version where everything is subtitled in German and probably a version where everything is subtitled in Italian.

We’ve also started to produce a couple of DVDs for the goverment institutions that gave us funding and for some film festivals. We hope to give you some awesome news about film festivals really soon.

These are actually the first three DVDs of our movie. They’ve all gone to Festivals and Funding institutions.

It’s still hard to say when the movie will be available on DVD or streaming for everybody. We will probably start the local rollout after each regional premiere. So the movie will be available in Austria after the Austrian premiere, in Germany after the German premiere, in the US after the US premiere and so on. This also accounts for our Kickstarter rewards. If all goes well, we will have all those premieres on film festivals in the next coming months. But, as mentioned before, it’s still too early to give any definitive details on that.

However, you’ll be the first to know about upcoming premieres and screenings. We can’t wait to show you the movie now that it’s actually ready.